Celebrating people who bring the Internet to life

INTERNET HALL of FAME
INNOVATOR

Eric Bina

Bina co-created, with fellow Internet Hall of Famer Marc Andreessen, the first version of the Mosaic web browser in 1993. Mosaic, a user-friendly browser with integrated graphics that worked on a wide variety of computers, played a key role in popularizing the World Wide Web.

Bina and Andreessen later co-founded the Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape’s Web browser was also wildly popular; its usage share was over 90 percent by the mid-1990s. Netscape is credited with developing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Protocol for securing online communication, which is still widely used,as well as JavaScript, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages.

In 2010, Bina and Andreessen received the Association for Computing Machinery’s Software System Award for developing “a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts and commercial acceptance.”

Bina attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science in 1986 and a master’s degree in 1988. He joined the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1991 as a programmer; it was there that he and Andreessen started working on Mosaic.